The Bugs Bunny Show
The prime-time repackaging of the Warner shorts, with an original curtain-raiser animated for television.
The Bugs Bunny Show opens with a main title sequence of 43 seconds.
At 43 seconds, it opens well under the 58-second median for animation sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ABC in 1960, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
43sA collector's 16mm print with the audio resynced. Overture, curtain, lights — the theatrical cast introducing itself on a stage, made specifically for the TV show rather than lifted from a short.
More animation opening titles from the 1960s
1 sequenceThe Flintstones
The first animated series in American primetime, and the source of a theme that did not arrive until the third season — the first two opened on something else entirely.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Jetsons
The same studio's future to answer its own past, with a theme that names the whole family in about fifteen seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScooby-Doo, Where Are You!
A theme that asks the title as a question, over a van and five characters who have been drawn the same way for fifty-five years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpeed Racer
Mach GoGoGo dubbed into English at speed, and the anime that got there before anyone called it that.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWacky Races
Eleven cars introduced one at a time by a narrator, which is a title sequence that is also the entire premise.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTop Cat
Hanna-Barbera doing Sgt. Bilko with alley cats, in the primetime slot the studio kept trying to hold.
- Season 1